by Mark W. LaPointe

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There is no argument that the use of fossil energy sources can affect the environment negatively. Anyone who lived in 1950’s Detroit can tell tales of ‘black snow’; coal ash ejected into the atmosphere by home and industrial furnaces, and falling back and coating the earth like black snow. Even today, my house is coated…

In an era that has seen social sensitivity driven to absurd proportions, there are practical areas where something called sensitivity has a place – unfortunately, it conflicts with popular notions of good personnel management. No one would dispute that good personnel management involves treating everyone fairly. The classic question is: Does treating everyone equally equate…

Russian armed forces incurred and occupied Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula on 27 February, 2014. A short time after the incursion, Crimea announced that a referendum would be held on March 16, 2014 to determine whether Crimea would secede from Ukraine and become part of the Russian Federation. In retrospect, it is apparent that the Russian occupation…

While browsing Facebook, I saw an advertisement that declared one of my Facebook friends has an IQ of ninety-two. That is only seventeen points higher than Forrest Gump’s! I am certain no one in our regular classes had such a low IQ and even the kids in the special learning classes, whom I tutored in…

Feed me, Seymour! In 1990, the fastest computer in the world was a vector supercomputer designed by Seymour Cray, dubbed the Cray-2; it could perform a mind-boggling 1.9 GigaFLOPS. Cray computers sold for about fifteen million dollars, plus the cost of the hard disks. A Giga-What? FLOP is an acronym for Floating-Point Operations per Second,…

There are three simple approaches to solving a problem: Ignore it Change the parameters that define the situation as a problem Solve the problem according to the original parameters Example: You are driving a car when the right front tire deflates. Ignore it; drive on three tires and one rim Redefine the parameters; Deflate the…

Active & Passive Voice Active The subject of an active sentence performs the action of the verb Passive The subject of a passive sentence just sits there, receiving it The passive voice (which has to do with who performs an action) is often confused with the past tense (which has to do with when), but…

Don’t believe everything you think – The Invisible Man Pay me now, or pay me later. Pay me later always costs more. Every problem has a simple solution, and it’s wrong – H. L. Mencken You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might like to have. – D. H.…